by Errol Young – BASICS Online February 2010
Over 100 community public schools could close in Toronto and the land sold to developers in three to five years.
This development should be of great concern to us all. First there is the economic scale of this thing. Selling 100 sites for about five millions dollars each means that over half a billion dollars will be exchanging hands. Second – and more importantly – these sales will result in a significant loss of publicly owned resources.
by Mike Brito – BASICS Online January 2010
Diabetes is a growing health epidemic that is alarmingly prevalent among working people. The Centre for Spatial Economics recently published a report called “Diabetes: A Brewing Economic Tsunami”, referring to the burden the disease will have on our health care system. An estimated 2.5 million Canadians currently suffer from this disease, up from 1.3 million in 2000. Diabetes rates will continue to rise dramatically over the next decade. By 2020, there will be as many as 3.7 million Canadians with diabetes, which means that more than 20 people will be diagnosed with this disease every hour.
(reproduced by BASICS with permission from the author)
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.
The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, most recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere.” This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the U.S. invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the U.S. government and some of its allies.
by M. Cook – BASICS #17 (Jan / Feb 2009)
Patrick LeSage, former Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Ontario, has been conducting public forums investigating Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s (TCHC) eviction policies after the death of a former TCHC tenant. We, at BASICS, want to provide tenants with another space to share their experiences and to organize to make changes. This article is intended to provide a brief overview of social housing and we hope to continue a series on social housing based on tenants’ experiences.
Issue #17 – U. of Toronto Edition
